Prince Harry has vowed to remain in the US - despite concerns his visa status could face challenges following Donald Trump's re-election.
The Duke of Sussex, 40, who has been based in Montecito, California, with Meghan Markle since 2020, has said the two will remain in the country, where he and his children "very much enjoy living". Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit earlier today, the Duke said he could do activities with his two children - Archie-Harrison Mountbatten and Princess Lilibet - that he "undoubtedly wouldn't be able to do in the UK".
He said: "I very much enjoy living here and bringing up my kids here." He added that now he and his family are settled in the country, he is focussed on "being the best husband and the best dad that I can be". Prince Harry has rarely returned to the UK since travelling across the pond nearly five years ago, only spending fleeting visits to attend major events like Queen Elizabeth II's funeral and others honouring his late mum Princess Diana.
But his presence in the US has come under fire from the hard-right US-based thinktank the Heritage Foundation, the organisation that proposed the controversial Project 2025, which has challenged his visa. The thinktank previously seized on a passage of the Prince's 2023 memoir Spare in which he writes of using marijuana, cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms.
Admissions of drug use can derail visa applications, and the Heritage Foundation had built a lawsuit asking a US judge to reveal whether he officially disclosed his usage. The foundation had argued that an admissions of this kind "generally renders such a person inadmissible for entry" to the country.
But US judge Carl Nichols ruled in September that the general public "does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke's immigration records". He added in his ruling: "Like any foreign national, the duke has a legitimate privacy interest in his immigration status."
Judge Nichols concluded that the public's interest in disclosing Prince Harry's immigration records is "outweighed by the duke's privacy interest". The foundation has since submitted a new court filing in an attempt to reopen the case, arguing the Biden administration did not allow attorneys to see private submissions to the judge.
Nile Gardiner, the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, recently said that, following the election of Donald Trump, "we will see the release of Harry's records by the next US administration".